The Brushy Creek Regional Utility Authority has reached a major milestone in the construction of its new water delivery system. All of the project's underground components, including two 11-foot-wide tunnels located underneath Lake Travis, have been completed.
"The underground work, the mining, the lining of the tunnels, is all now complete, aside from minor touch ups," Aaron Archer, senior vice president at the civil engineering firm Walker Partners told the Leander City Council last month.
Formed in 2007, the BCRUA is a partnership of Cedar Park, Leander and Round Rock. It's responsible for treating and distributing water from the Lower Colorado River Authority — the public agency that manages Lake Travis.
Construction of the new $225 million water delivery system began in 2022. Once completed, the system is expected to increase BCRUA's water supply to 145 million gallons per day and reduce its vulnerability to drought.
"The main drivers of the project have always been kind of twofold," BCRUA General Manager Sam Roberts said. "One, to provide a safe, reliable and cost effective regional supply to the three fast growing cities. And then the second, very important driver, was to construct a drought resilient deep water intake far enough out into Lake Travis to reduce the impact that severe droughts have on everybody's ability to draw water."
Right now, the cities draw water from the lake using pumps attached to floating barges. The problem with this method, Roberts said, is that it's susceptible to fluctuating lake levels.
"The floating barges are located up in Sandy Creek Cove ... which is actually a fairly deep cove," he said. "However, these extreme droughts that we've gotten ... drop the lake so low that those floating pump stations were actually, at times, in very near danger of bottoming out to where they weren't going to be able to function anymore."
The BCRUA's new delivery system is expected to help solve this problem.
Once completed, the system will allow the BCRUA to draw water from deep below the surface of Lake Travis. The water will then move through one of the newly constructed underground tunnels to a pump station. From there, the water will be pumped through the other underground tunnel to the existing Leander, Cedar Park and BCRUA water treatment plants.
All of that means: "When Lake Travis' levels do drop, we'll still be able to pump water out of the lake," said Michael Thane, Round Rock's executive director of public works.
For Round Rock, that also means getting up to an additional 40.8 million gallons of water per day from Lake Travis.
"Having a water system that's reliable and has the capacity to meet the growing needs is very important for a city when businesses and properties are looking to develop," Thane said.
Thane said he expects the additional water from the project will help support Round Rock for the next 30 to 40 years.
Thane, who has been tapped to oversee Williamson County's $500,000 water study, said regional partnerships, such as the BCRUA, will be key as the county explores ways to secure water for the future.
"Building an individual project by city was going to be challenging, was going to be expensive," Thane said. "But when three cities in a similar area come together and form a regional partnership, like Round Rock, Cedar Park and Leander did, [it] makes it feasible."
Still, Thane acknowledged there are challenges. Oftentimes, he said, cities are in different stages of development — meaning not everyone's water needs are the same.
"When you do enter a regional partnership, it's very important that you have to be a little flexible with scheduling and when you spend your money and things like that, to make it really work," Thane said. "If one city needs a water plan expansion sooner than the other two, you have to be able to bring money to the table sooner than you may need to."
At the end of the day, though, Thane said, a partnership like the BCRUA is about helping and trusting others for the common good.
"Say one of the cities needed additional water sooner than the other two, and say the other two had extra capacity already in the system. One of the other two cities with the extra capacity could help the other city with some their shortfall for a year or two or three," he said. "So that flexibility is good ... and that's a benefit to partnering and trusting each of the cities that they're going to do what they're supposed to do."
The BCRUA's new water delivery system is expected to be completed sometime in 2027.
